


all the wild horses

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Boarding School, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 08:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8438359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: You know, when I was at boarding school, there was a girl I knew…very well. And she attempted suicide. She slit her wrists in the bathtub. But it wasn't enough. She should have cut the metatarsal arteries on the top of her feet too.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: attempted suicide, self-harm]
> 
> Anonymous asked: I know you take a lot of ficlet prompts, so I figured I'd send this bit of head canon to you. Rachel and Delphine are less than a year apart in age and spent time in boarding school on the same continent. Thus, there is arguably a smidge of a chance that they actually crossed paths early in life, long before Delphine joined DYAD. I thought of this while pondering Delphine's scene about the girl who attempted suicide at boarding school.. But anyway, I'll say no more~

Delphine won’t remember this, later, but Rachel will.

Not that it matters.

Which is to say: Rachel is the one who finds Delphine in the bathtub. She opens the door and the moment freezes obligingly, the world dragging itself into slow motion to better suit the scene. Picture it: Rachel Duncan standing in the doorway, skirt perfectly pressed, all of the lines of her uniform pin-straight. She has, by this time, stopped braiding her hair in pigtails; it falls in a single neat braid down her back, serpentine. Her eyes are very wide.

Picture it: Delphine in the bathtub, white and gold and very, very red. Mostly red, in fact. She is still breathing, but it doesn’t seem the sort of thing that will last for very long.

“What have you done,” Rachel says, voice a weak rasp. As far as first words go, they are awful.

Delphine opens her eyes, with great effort. Her eyes roll languorously over to Rachel. “I don’t know you,” she says. As far as last words go, they are even worse.

Thankfully, both of them will get the chance at a do-over. Someday. A long, long time from now.

* * *

All the girls are whispering in the hallways and Rachel has locked herself in – a different – bathroom. She is scrubbing all of the blood off of her hands. Her mind is a dull roar, a constant susurrus of facts. They had pulled the girl into a stretcher and taken her away. Her name is Delphine. The blood on Rachel’s hands is coming off alright, but it will probably have stained her sleeves. Delphine Cormier. Rachel will have to buy a new top. Delphine watched her every second while they pulled her out of the room, and she had looked so angry.

Rachel rests her hands on the edges of the sink and looks at herself in the mirror. She does the familiar litany: the slight lidding of her eyelids is her own, the angry edges of her mouth are her own, the way she holds her jaw is her own. Rachel is the only self-aware clone in Project Leda. Rachel is more special than any of the other subjects, and Rachel is more special than anyone at this school. It doesn’t matter that she’s alone. It’s for the best.

It’s a strange, hollow thing to repeat to herself now that a girl is out there possibly dying. But it soothes the rabbit-racing of her heart. The words are the only familiar thing she has, besides her face – and that, in and of itself, is little comfort. 

She is never going to tell Aldous. That will make this into something that it isn’t – her psychiatrist will coax meaning out of her at the Institute, and this will grow and grow until it consumes her. 

Rachel puts Delphine Cormier into a box and puts that box in the attic of her mind, behind her parents and adjacent to her loneliness. She dries off her hands, rolls up her sleeves, and exits the room with her mask back firmly in place.

* * *

Delphine comes back to school four days later with bandaged wrists and pronounced bags under her eyes. She is, immediately and with a determined efficiency, made a pariah. None of the girls say anything, but it’s known: you do not speak to Delphine Cormier. You do not sit near her at meals. You can look at her all you’d like, though. You can pick her apart with your eyes.

It’s inevitable that Delphine would find Rachel, at some point – this is that sort of story, of course, but it’s also only practical. Rachel eats alone. Delphine now also eats alone. Space finds space. 

When Delphine cuts at her meat with her knife and fork, her sleeves ride up. 

“They’ve given you a knife,” Rachel says, voice mild. 

Delphine lets out a harsh bark of a sound, clenches her hand tight around the utensil in question. “Yes,” she says. Her jaw works and Rachel watches her curiously – she wants to see if Delphine can break through the wall of everyone in this school not talking about it. 

But she can’t. She lets out a breath that edges on being a sob, and stabs at her meat with her fork. The meat lets out a pool of blood and juice, leaking slowly around the edges of Delphine’s plate.

“It’s strange,” Rachel says. “You’d think they would have given you a monitor. Someone to watch over you.”

“And who would have volunteered,” Delphine says. “You?”

* * *

There’s blood in the grout around the bathtub when Rachel goes back. Two days later it’s gone. Rachel repaints her nails the next day, opens the window of her room wide so that the smell dissipates. 

She lives on the second floor of the building. Below her: the drop.

 _Why_ , she wants to ask Delphine. _Why._

* * *

Delphine smokes on the roof, legs pale against the tiles. It’s nighttime and the plume of smoke rising looks awful and ghostly in the dark. Rachel is late coming back from riding practice; she stops to watch the smoke rise against the black. It’s strange, that the school would allow some deaths and not others. Maybe it’s just that this is slow. By the time she – well. It won’t be the administrators’ problem.

“Are you following me,” Delphine says, voice carrying clear and easy down to the ground.

Rachel looks up at her. _You’re the one who keeps reaching out to me_ , she wants to say, but that just makes her think of Delphine watching Rachel as they pulled her from the tub. Her eyes all full of blame: this is _your_ fault.

“I’m not following you, Delphine,” she says, and goes to head inside.

“I don’t know your name,” Delphine calls from the roof. 

Rachel doesn’t answer.

* * *

Four nights later she sits next to Delphine on the roof. Delphine is smoking. Rachel is sitting with her hands clenched on her knees – she doesn’t like heights. That’s what comes of living six years of your life in a room with no windows.

Delphine offers her the cigarette, wordless, and Rachel takes it. There’s a neat plum ring of lipstick around one end of the cigarette; Rachel puts her mouth on it exactly, dreams the taste of it into her mouth. Instead what fills her lungs is smoke, awful and bitter. She chokes, passes it back.

Delphine laughs. It’s the closest to happy Rachel has ever heard her sound, in their brief acquaintance.

“You don’t smoke,” she says, and takes the cigarette back.

 _The careers of hundreds of scientists rely on my lungs_ , Rachel thinks. She says: “No.”

“Why are you here, then?” Delphine says. 

“I don’t like heights,” Rachel says.

“That sounds like a reason _not_  to be here,” Delphine says.

“I find it best,” Rachel says, “to confront the things that terrify me.”

* * *

The gold shine of Delphine’s hair in the moonlight. The dark near-black shape of her lips. Rachel’s hair in a braid, Rachel’s lips unpainted. She folds her hands tight in her lap in the dark and watches the ground, the horrible gaping mouth of the dirt. One of Delphine’s hands is planted on the roof between them; the other one brings the cigarette to her lips, over and over and over again.

If Rachel took her hands out of her lap and put them on the roof one of them would brush against Delphine’s hand, her fingers. Her wrist.

 _I find it best to confront the things that terrify me,_ Rachel had said, but those are just words. Only some fears are the kind that send you off to war, head held high and heart blazing. Some fears you put into a box and file away, next to old memories and older loves. Some fears you never even admit to yourself.

When Rachel leaves boarding school, at the end of the year, Delphine will show up in Rachel’s doorway and give her the tube of lipstick. When the fall term starts Delphine’s lips will be bare. When Rachel turns sixteen her lips will be red.

But for now, there they are – two girls on a rooftop, horribly unknowing. Both of them are thinking: we have been through the worst of it, now, and we are done. It can’t possibly ever get worse than this.

* * *

The bandages come off. There are no scars.

It’s strange. It seems like there should be.

**Author's Note:**

> All the pictures of your mother, all the places that you know  
> All the lessons of your lovers and the things you never show  
> You know you could be mistaking me for somebody else  
> All the roses you can send to me could sit on my shelf  
> \--"All the Places," Made in Heights
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
